by Peter Carey
But what could I do about this, even if I wanted to do something? Nothing more than what I had done already e.g. suck up to Kev and get some materials on tick. Should I have telephoned Jean-Paul first? Asked his opinion? It is absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy paintings think. Of course I knew who Greenberg was. As far as I can see he was a technician, a radio repairman. He only said one thing worth knowing: the problem with art is the people who buy it.
For a period on the banks of the Never Never I made paintings unlike any I had ever seen or painted before. Day after day, night after night I terrified myself, hardly knowing what I thought.
And through all of this there was Hugh, and shopping and cooking, and shitting and chopping the thistles, no woman, no drops of lavender sprinkled on her nameless breasts at night.
For every man shall bear his own burden, as our mum would say, and so through all of this was Hugh, and his deep little elephant eyes, every night and morning, through the end of the steamy mouldy summer, until the grass in the front paddock began to fleck with brown like a Harris tweed, and Hugh would still set off into Bellingen with his billy in his hand.
People were kind to him, never said they weren’t. City wisdom says these little Australian towns are intolerant but that was not the case in my experience and I fully expected that a place the size of Bellingen would have its Bachelor Gentleman and its Manly Lady Doctor with steel-tipped boots and serge trousers tough enough to sand your walls. There was room for Slow Bones too, room for everyone in a jostling edgy kind of way.
While I mixed paint, Hugh sat in the Bridge Hotel and made his single beer last from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. I had this all arranged. His chicken-and-lettuce sandwich was delivered to him in his corner, same place each day, beside the radio.
I had no idea I was living in a perfect time. All I saw were irritations: calls from Jean-Paul, my lawyer, and then this long, long silence from Dozy which really did begin to eat my gut. I wanted to see the Leibovitz. It was my right, but I would not call him.
There would always be some crisis.
I thought these upsets were so bloody terrible. Hugh gone missing, Hugh fighting, Hugh distressed, so you can imagine it is a late-summer morning and I am painting and all I can hear are the cockatoos ripping the shit out of the trees above my head, and the cries of magpies, kookaburras, the bull at Mrs. Dyson’s, and amongst all this many smaller birds, orioles, honeyeaters, grass wrens, butcher-birds, the sweet rush of the wind in the casuarinas by the river—I can hear a great roaring cry, not a bull calf, but like a bull calf on its way to being a steer, and although I continue painting I know this is my brother coming home—big sloping shoulders, meaty arms, lumbering along the narrow bitumen with his shirttails out and the empty billy in his hand and his whiskery face crumpled like a paper bag and that odd, Roman nose, flowing with snot and this is why, even when I lived in Paradise, I had no fucking idea of where I was.
7
Bald shiny shaven Butcher Bones said look at my works etc but nowhere did he confess Hugh Bones was his helper. He signed each painting MICHAEL BOONE it would have been more truthful if it was CROSSED BONES. Every artist is a pirate as he himself has often said. But forgive me I thought every artist was a bloody king these days I must be wrong as usual.
Crossed Bones obtained his roll of canvas by the use of lies and I carried it on my back and lay it kindly in the ute while he fussed about me the NERVOUS NELLY. At home I was his navvy lumping canvas up the stairs to the studio and rolling it out across the floor. No witnesses to this. All private, him and me.
He goes—Look at that Hugh! How about that Hugh! We will make a bloody big picture here Hugh! It is a beauty! Will you cut it for me, mate? Just here, just here, you are a bloody genius Hugh!
But there is only one Genius in his VERSION OF EVENTS. Everyone is amazed that such a creature as Michael Boone would emerge from Bacchus Marsh which they assume must be a cess pit, misnaming it Buckus Marsh or Bacchus Swamp and thereby demonstrating they don’t know what they’re talking about although the best lamb chops in the southern hemisphere were produced there. Cleaver, saw, wooden block. I wished them to be mine.
When he asked me to cut his Dutch canvas I was very bloody tired, having walked all the way to town and up by the Guthries’ dam where I got a whole family of ticks attached to the underside of my balls. I was weary and itchy but he must MAKE ART. Bless me, I never grudged him no matter what he has said about me. For instance, at night I lie in bed and pull my pillow across my head trying not to hear him talk to the DOZY RICH MAN. Oh what a bloody big burden I appear to be, all whisper and distress God save me.
Can you cut it for me, Hugh?
Did I ever hear him tell the Rich Man that his brother can track a single thread down across the canvas, follow it like a single black ant through the summer grass, lying on my stomach THE HUMAN MICROSCOPE? No, never. Bless me, did I complain? Did I ever point out how strange it was to now be granted control of the LETHAL BLADE because never, not ever, would my so-called family give me a SCABBARD, never would they let me draw the blade across the holy living skin. Hold the basin Jason, but never hold the knife. But now I am the one with the MURDER WEAPON and I can lie on the floor in his studio and follow a single weft thread of his Dutch canvas—not to him was this talent granted, nor my superior strength. It makes him very happy to watch me part one thread from its neighbour for nine feet and not one mistake the whole length of it. My perfect cut is a SECRET MARK OF GRACE that’s what he told me don’t worry that he doesn’t believe in God and writes his HOLY WORDS without relent, long handle, stiff three-inch bristles. He pays $10 per brush and in a rage he writes God’s words forever. WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM? as they say.
I was Slow Bones. I know its meaning no matter what I said before. They would not give me the knife or steel or scabbard. Instead I must ride the bloody cart and pony taking orders. Lovely Lamb Chops today Mrs. Puncheon. And would that be a pound of cat’s meat once again? I never could accept I had been forbade the knife although I would have killed the beasts more kindly bless them their big eyes reflecting back my face at me. Thus does God in his mercy see our countenance.
For a long time I blamed my mother for not speaking up on my behalf. She was just a little thing, a cockney sparrow with great black sunken eyes, always on the lookout for the last day, final hour, our turn will come. She had a terror of knives, dear Mum, poor Mum, and who could blame her when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bless her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives. But my ordained future was nightly locked away.
But when all was lost and gone, in later years, our shop and home turned into a video store, all hope abandoned, then was I appointed knife man to my brother’s canvas. Explain this cruelty if you will. In this and other ways I became his MANSERVANT. For instance, in the studio there is a plastic ice-cream tub with tweezers laying in it, like something at the dentist’s before he hurts your gums. These tweezers will not get mentioned when Michael Boone is holding forth with his opinions—Clement Greenberg is a radio mechanic, etc. You might be advised to ask him, Oh what is that bloody big bowl filled with tweezers? The answer is—So Hugh the idiot can kneel before me and remove from the wet paint all the little bits of flick and fleck the bodies of the dead the parts of matter the fluff and bumph and snot of life which interfere with the purity of TWO-DIMENSIONAL SPACE.
I have been informed that there is no-one else on Earth who could part those threads for nine feet without an error. But then again I do not care, all is vanity, and many times I think I am nothing but a big swishing gurgling pumping clock, walking backwards and forwards along the road to Bellingen each day, spring, summer, flies, moths, dragon-flies, all fluttering flittering tiny clocks, a mist of clocks, each moment closer to oblivion. Impediments to art. Who wil
l remove us with the tweezers?
I never wished to die up here in northern New South Wales with the leeches and ticks and bloody flood sucking at the bank, everything damp, mouldy. I was born beneath the WERRIBEE RAIN SHADOW so give me a grave in a dry place, hard yellow soil where you can see the marks of crowbar like witchetty grub tracks on the rock of ages. I never wished to die here but my true home has been turned into a video store, mother, father all lost to me, so I am poor Hugh, bloody Hugh, the human clock.
Butcher Bones is not liked in Bellingen. It was the same in the Marsh. Who can like a man who shaves his head in order to prevent his father cutting his hair? No-one liked him any more than they liked the GERMAN BACHELOR and then he was off to the city only returning briefly when Blue Bones had his stroke and his own mother wept begging him to take up the steel and scabbard, he would not although he returned to Melbourne and secretly worked in the William Angliss meat factory. He said I only have one life which is a lie. Now he has the condition of AMNESIA clearly forgetting what injury he had done to home and family and here in Bellingen he is always saying Oh, I am a COUNTRY BOY or I am from the Marsh but they see him there with his dark fast flicking eyes, cheating and lying and putting things on account of Jean-Paul Milan and he is only saved because they steal from Jean-Paul too.
It was one day or another. He was puddling in his paint, I was approaching the township, the road rising up above the Bellinger River and the last flood had subsided leaving grass as flat as dead men and something like sad vomit not yet hosed away. By the pylons of the bridge there were still the old sticks piled up FLOTSAM JETSAM, a dreadful bower of bark, lantana, all sorts of vegetable and mineral, including a fence post with wire trailing like fish gut from its top hole. That was when I observed it, saw it from a distance, blue and grey, not much bigger than a breakfast sausage. At that moment a dirty big timber jinker came speeding into the corner, dropping gears, throwing bark, raising dust, tossing flies and thrips all breathing life, into the greatest of confusion. The world has ended, thought the fly. My heart was pumping, sloshing blood from one room to the next. Meat and music, two beats per second, I went ploughing down the hill, off the shoulder of the road down the embankment towards the river. What I had seen was my puppy’s dry tail, his unlit byre, God save him. It was a shock, bless me, but there he was, his lip curled back, some evil thing had eaten at him. His bottom was half pulled out. God bless him, I pulled his feathery little body up with my whittled stick and I didn’t know what then to do. I came up to the road, my new shirt torn by the fence. I was thinking I would get a wheat bag to put him in and take him home, it would be a muddy resting place, tucked up inside the ANCIENT FLOODPLAIN with the river rocks. I should have gone to the co-op they would have accommodated me, but the pub was closer and I went in there. I have my normal corner by the wireless. I didn’t put him on the bar, everything hygienic.
Nothing was usual except Merle brought me my schooner and I set out to drink it, even at that moment wishing to be polite. Normally I would make the drink last hours but now I set to finish it immediately. It was that wet-ashtray-stinking time of day, that is, before Kevin from the co-op farts and lights his pipe. At first I had no company excepting a heroin addict with no bum inside his trousers, but then the Guthries entered. There are two Guthries, the bigger one is Evan but his brother is normally of a very decent disposition. I learned the Guthries had been on a fencing contract for three weeks and having just discovered that their cheque had bounced they were not in the best of moods. Gary Guthrie had announced he would take his D24 out to the fence line and destroy the last three weeks of work. He was very bitter. As there was no-one but the heroin addict in the pub, and him completely silent, I could not help but hear the conversation. Likewise they observed my puppy. Evan did not speak to me but he told Merle I should be reported to the Health Inspector. I loudly asked Merle did she have a handy box because anything that would hold a dozen bottles could also hold my dog. She said she had just burnt all the cardboard. The heroin addict took his beer out to the footpath.
Evan then gave the opinion I was a moron for drinking with a dead dog. He was a big bugger, legs like the fence posts he spent his life burying in the earth. I did not answer him, relying on the brother, but the brother was downcast, his mind filled with vengeance such as ripping down three miles of fence and dozing it into the creek. In the hop-sour shadows of the public bar his plans were blooming like PATTERSON’S CURSE. Evan made a remark about the cause of the injury to the puppy’s bottom, I turned the other cheek, but when he tried to violently confiscate the body, I was swift as an AZURE KINGFISHER flashing across the mustard yellow skin of the flood. I took his little finger, as crunchy as a dragonfly inside the beak.
Evan was what you call an OLD FAMILY in the district. His photo was on the wall, a ruckman in the Bellingen XVIII but now he was forced to descend to the level of the skirting board, howling, holding his FRACTURED METACARPAL against his chest.
IN THE WINK OF AN EYE he was brought low.
Gary moved towards me. I placed the dog carefully on the bar and Evan’s protector understood his danger perfectly.
Listen Num-num, he said, you tell your fucking burglar brother he is no longer welcome in the district.
Thus I mistakenly believed that it was on account of Evan Guthrie’s fractured metacarpal my brother and I would be cast out. I could not bear it. Everything I blamed Butcher Bones for I had now done myself. I proceeded homewards in great distress, a fly, a wasp, an ENEMY OF ART.
8
I cannot blame Hugh—that would be ridiculous—nor can I equate myself with Van Gogh. Just the same I am entitled to make the point that it was Vincent’s saintly brother Theo who brought an end to sixty days of painting in Auvers-sur-Oise. You can find three thousand art books filled with bad reproductions and as many dull opinions that the sixty paintings from those sixty days were a “final flowering” and the crows in Vincent’s wheat field were a “clear sign” he was about to kill himself. But fuck me Jesus, a crow is just a bird and Vincent was alive, and there were crows and wheat in front of him and he was producing a canvas every day. He was as mad as a toilet brush—why not?—and as boring as a painter, and Dr. Gachet may not have actually invited his patient to come and live with him, but painters do these things, so suck it up.
When the sun went down, when the light was lost, Gachet’s house must have reeked of Vincent’s need. So sorry on everyone’s behalf. At the same time, he was on the phone to God, and after sixty days he went down to visit Theo on the Paris train, not to plan a fucking suicide, but to talk about selling some of these paintings. Why not? There is not the least doubt he knew the value of what he had done.
From Auvers-sur-Oise to Paris is a very short journey. I have made it myself, quite recently, and a less romantic trip is hard to imagine, even in Sydney’s western suburbs. In my case it was made even less appealing by my companions, one of whom had nasty lip sores and a mighty desire that we should share the same Pernod bottle. Ninety minutes after walking down Dr. Gachet’s now-famous garden path I was in Paris. Ditto Vincent. Theo was his dealer, his famous supporter, his brother, the man in whose arms he would soon die, but just the same Theo Van Bloody Gogh did exactly what dealers always do i.e. he told him how shitty the market was, that the fashion had not yet changed in his direction, that the collector who had promised to buy had now died, or gone away, or had lost his money in a divorce, etc. Theo, God help him, was depressed. He thought it was time for Vincent to face “reality” which is what Vincent then did, for he went back to Auvers-sur-Oise and two days later he shot himself in the chest.
When I heard Hugh roaring bawling along the road, I had only had forty-seven days and they could not have made me stop with either rope or bullet. I had eight huge canvases stored in a bloody manger, and a ninth one lying flat and naked on the floor.
Hugh’s face was beaten to a pulp, already swelling, a film of blood and snot all over the wide canvas of his cheeks, some of it
spilling onto the desiccated corpse he carried so tenderly it might have been a newborn child. It took an hour to extract the story but even then I was confused, imagining the blood to be the result of his fight with Evan Guthrie. It would be another week before I learned that he had been seen on the road above the river banging his head against an ironbark and all the abrasions and bruises across his face, all the broken tissue that would soon swell up and leave him yellow, pink, purple as a foie gras terrine, all this he did to himself, for he, like me, misunderstood the situation.
This was not the first little finger he had broken, and the previous one had caused me more pain and loss than I can yet reveal. Hugh and I thought ourselves in a similar predicament again but, as you will see soon enough, whilst we were quite correct in thinking our tenancy in peril, nothing was exactly as it appeared to be. In any case, I did not abuse my brother this second time. I was sick at heart but did not show it. I encouraged him to continue with his immediate plan which was to find a high dry place to bury his dog whose queer light corpse I helped place in my best rucksack. Thus he set off, dog in pack, spade and crowbar in his hands, and I returned to my canvas. For I knew the clock was running, that soon the midgets of officialdom would be swarming around us, like a white-ant hatch threatening to glue itself to the perfect holy surface of the living paint.
Being short of supplies and having met resistance from Kevin at the co-op, I had had no work planned that day, but time is precious, passing with every breath and I decided I would touch the thing I had been frightened of the most, the framed embroidery our mother hung above her dreadful bed: IF YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A MAN DIE, REMEMBER THAT YOU, TOO, MUST GO THE SAME WAY. IN THE MORNING CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY NOT LIVE TILL EVENING, AND WHEN EVENING COMES DO NOT DARE TO PROMISE YOURSELF THE DAWN.